Will Romney Have To Swing at Perry?

FoxNews just noted that Mitt Romney has been keeping his focus relentlessly on where he's long kept it -- squarely aimed at Barack H. Obama.

That's all well and good. I sort of like that.

But I don't think he'll be able to maintain that. Perry isn't exactly hammering Romney with attacks, and he's not hitting him with anything new. But he is hitting him.

Romney's strategy made sense as long as he was the front-runner. By ignoring his rivals, and only getting into arguments with his would-be general election opponent Obama, he could propagate the idea that all this primary business was a formality and the real headliner of Romney v. Obama was set in stone.

I have given Romney props on this before. If there is one thing I have liked about him, it was his combination of hammering Obama only, and dismissing his rivals as pretenders to the Alpha Dog throne. (His best Alpha Dog moment came when Pawlenty made that scripted semi-joke about mowing only one acre of Romeny's lawn, and the debate moderator asked if he wanted to respond, Romney just smiled and said "That's just fine." As in, "I need not stoop.")

But that was a different situation. Well ahead of his rivals, and the only candidate the Establishment was even halfway confident in, he could use his front-runner status to further his front-runner status.

But he's not the front-runner now.

I really don't want him beatin' up on my boy Perry, but I don't see how he can avoid doing so.

Of course the trap in that, now, is the media's new headline becomes Desperate Romney forced into campaign re-think of that kind of thing. Still, that's a one day story, and it doesn't say much more than we already know (i.e., Romney is no longer the front-runner).

posted by Ace at 07:07 PM

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